Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.5.26

Few contemporary
scholars have made as many interesting and valuable contributions as Richard
Seaford to understanding Euripides' most problematical play (see e. g.,
Dionysiac Poetics [henceforth DP]
354), and I regret being on the opposite side of the interpretive fence.
In the new Afterword to DP and elsewhere I have set
out some of the reasons for my disagreements with S.'s approach, and it
would be tedious to repeat all of that here; but S.'s comments offer an
opportunity to clarify yet again some fundamental differences of outlook
that may hopefully be of interest to more than just the two of
us.1

The difference between our views rests on fundamentally different notions
of how literature works. For S. Greek tragedy, grosso modo,
replicates cultural patterns; for me, it is engaged in more "complex"
negotiations with these patterns, using them, to be sure, but not always
in a direct one-to-one correspondence, and not necessarily simply affirming
them or restamping them onto its narrative material. In my Afterword, apropos
of the antithetical views of S. and Froma Zeitlin about Dionysus and the
city (DP 357), I tried briefly to address the question
of why knowledgeable and sophisticated interpreters can and do differ so
widely. One of the issues between S. and myself is the difference between
an exclusionary reading (for S. the Bacchae can be understood
only in terms of its ritual background) and one more open to the potential
multiplicity of meaning.

Tragedy as a whole is obviously part of the Athenian polis and serves
democratic ideology (as Simon Goldhill, for instance has recently demonstrated
in a celebrated essay); but individual tragedies relate to this polis-ideology
in different ways, e. g., by questioning or probing familiar values, or
by examining various roles for men and women in the city, or by setting
up situations of hypothetical conflicts between overlapping roles (Antigone,
Oedipus Tyrannus, or Ion can serve
as obvious examples of such "complex" relations to civic ideology).
Even if we fully accept S.'s interesting and plausible hypotheses about
the origins of tragedy and the importance of hero cult
in the formation of tragedy as a genre and as an institution
of the Athenian democracy, we cannot necessarily assume that every tragedy
uses aetiological myth about hero cult or about civic or ritual foundations
in the same way or that this use will remain constant over several decades.
S., therefore, seems to superimpose on Euripides' text a monolithic structure
that is extrapolated from elsewhere and is not always fully applicable
to the specific literary work. S. reads the end of Ba.
as another instance of a recurrent pattern of the salvation of the polis
through the destruction of the royal family and the future establishment
of the civic cult of Dionysus, whereas I see a darker mood of divine vengeance,
which must, of course, be considered alongside the beauty and blessings
of Dionysiac worship and the narrowness and violence of Pentheus in the
first half of the play.

S.'s intense concentration on Dionysiac mysteries, initiation, and aetiological
ritual in the polis and hence in tragedy leads him to dismiss too easily
other possible meanings and functions of ritual in tragedy. To take just
one example, S. is silent about the ambiguities of many aetiological endings
in Euripides (DP 387). Doubtless he takes these at face
value, but this is hardly the majority opinion on the ending of (say) Hippolytus,
Electra, or Ion (see F. M. Dunn's
recent Tragedy's End). Because of this same one-sided view of
ritual
in
tragedy he plays down my long chapter on initiation ritual in Ba.
and faults my book for not being able "on the whole to locate the
play in its culture," paying no heed, for instance, to the considerable
attention that the book devotes to sacrifice, the cultural significance
of hunting, gender roles and reversals, the contemporary nomos-physis
debate, theories of language, the changing functions of myth, the chorus,
or the depiction of Dionysus in comedy, to which I would add also the attention
given to female lament in the Afterword (DP 362-67),
to cite a few areas that might be included in a view of "culture"
somewhat broader than S. implies. True, DP is interested
more in language than in ritual, and I am more explicitly interested than
S. in connections with our own contemporary conceptions of tragedy and
literary meaning, but we are all entitled to choose the methods and approaches
that we find most congenial: vive la différence!

S. reads Ba. as if the original audience came away
with a feeling of satisfaction, or "integration," because (as
he argues) Dionysus and Dionysiac cult have been brought to Thebes and
that under this sign of a democratic city the royal family is driven out
and honor is now given to the god. The terrible suffering is there, as
he (finally) acknowledges in his review, but it is absorbed and explained
by the aetiological myth. S.'s model works less well for Ba.
than for plays like Ajax or Hipp.,
where a closing lament for a dead protagonist may (as he suggests) reflect
and fortify the solidarity of the polis in hero cult. But if S. is right
about Ba., there is an enormous and unbridgeable gap
between modern audiences' response to the play and the response that S.
reconstructs for the ancient audience, and it would be vital to explore
this gap. In his review of DP S. seems to be approaching
this question when he acknowledges the play's "manifest suffering"
or (quoting DP) its lack of "happy resolution"
or "happy ending" (DP 354-55). But he then
goes off into a discussion of his views of aetiological ritual without
clarifying how the mood of the ending squares with the supposed integrative
value of the ritual meaning. If S. is to convince us of the interpretive
value of his approach, it is imperative that he do this, and I would be
the first to welcome this step in bringing ritual origins and function
together with what most interpreters see as the Bacchae's
dramatic effect. In the meantime, since we do not yet have time machines,
such a reconstruction of an "original" response is essentially
another literary interpretation and so must be tested by its adequacy to
the text.

To put these issues a little differently, is there a joyful triumph
of Dionysus and a relatively unproblematic exile of the Theban royal house,
and do these constitute the message that Euripides, writing the Bacchae
in the last years of his life in exile in Macedonia, wanted to leave with
his audience? If so, why the chorus's change toward increasing violence
and vengefulness as the play progresses, and why the so powerfully dramatized
sympathy for Agave (which of course we would feel with even greater power
if we had the complete text of her lament), to say nothing of Pentheus
and Cadmus? These are among the continuing questions of the "problem
of the Bacchae"; and, like the ever-shifting balance
between Pentheus and Dionysus in interpretations of the play, they will
inevitably receive further formulations and solutions; but I find S.'s
explanation in the suffering of the hero in civic cult an inadequate answer.

The rigidity of S.'s ritual/initiatory approach leads him to detect
"mistranslations" even where I am not translating. Thus I am
alleged to have construed di' aionos makrou in Hipp.
1425 as meaning "in the remote future," and "the slip is
revealing" because of my apparent misunderstanding of aetiological
myth. But in the passage in question I do not offer the phrase "in
the remote future" as a translation, indirect paraphrase, or even
vague approximation of the Greek. I am merely pointing out the difference
between the present action on the stage and the "remote," later
time, indicated by Artemis' future tenses, when these rites will be performed.
The fact that these rites, once established, will (as S. says) last "(in
effect) for all time" has little to do with my point at DP
387. That paragraph of mine, incidentally, begins, "Euripides frequently
ends a play with an aetiological myth about the foundation of a cult,"
and goes on to talk about a number of instances.

S.'s "slip" in alleging my mistranslation here is particularly
"revealing" for his determination to see only positive, integrative
movements in these closing etiologies. S. goes on: "The prenuptial
ritual for Hippolytus is in fact in various respects highlyappropriate for the unmarried hero who will be forever
lamented in it" [my emphasis]. "Highly appropriate," perhaps,
in a ritual sense, but hardly so in terms of the character of Hippolytus
that the play has constructed. The same holds true of the "non-silencing"
of Phaedra's erôs in the following lines.

Matters of translation aside, the ending of the Hippolytus
is particularly instructive for the understanding the tone of
Ba.'s
finale.
Granting that Dionysus' lost speech in the lacuna may have contained an
account of the foundation of his cult in Thebes, Cadmus' questions about
the god's excessive cruelty are left unanswered. In contrast to the allusions
to civic ritual in Hipp.'s closing reference to public
lament in "this common grief for all the citizens," Ba.
offers only the private suffering of the mother and grandfather. In contrast
to the healing and purifying forgiveness between father and son in the
farewell scene of Hipp., the Ba.
emphasizes the meagerness and futility of the comfort that the survivors
can give one another: cf. Hipp. 1449-58 and Ba.
1363-67. Pace S., the "city of Thebes" does
seem to be implicated in the disasters shown in the play (39-40, 50-52,
1036, 1295, on which more below), and nothing in our text promises a future
salvation. The mood of the exodos does not suggest anything like the ending
of the Phoenissae, where Menoeceus' sacrifice offers
hope of ending the cycle of Thebes' sufferings, or even the end of the
OT, where at least the source of the pollution is removed
and a new order is in place.

S. claims that I also mistranslate the famous line, Ba.
861, with its contrast of Dionysus as deinotatos and
êpiôtatos. In his valuable 1996 Translation and
Commentary
on the play S. has put forth an interesting but I think unlikely interpretation
of the problematic phrase en telei. Adopting the emendation
W(S for P's O(\S in 860, S. translates 859-61: "[Pentheus] will recognise
Dionysos the son of Zeus, that he was born to be a god in initiation
ritual
most terrible, but to humankind most gentle." I do not think that
the theme of initiation is sufficiently in the foreground to make a reference
to it here intelligible. Nor can I agree with S. (ad loc., p. 217) that
there is "a strong antithesis between en telei
and 'humankind' (anthrôpoisi)." The
antithesis is clearly between deinotatos and
êpiôtatos.
Whether or not S. is right here (and editors have been discussing and emending
this phrase for at least two hundred years), it is characteristic of our
differences that I see the relation between these two adjectives as stating
a problem about Dionysus that Euripides wants us to think about, whereas
for S. the lines refer to Dionysus' role in initiation into his mysteries.
But, as most commentators note, any attempt to separate the two superlatives
and put them on different levels is extremely dubious. A glance at the
passages collected in Roux's commentary, by the way, shows how persistent
is the ancient polarity of "gentleness" and "terror"
in Dionysus.

Even granting that en telei (a) is textually sound
and (b) refers to initiation, one has to ask what such a statement would
mean coming as it does just at the moment when Dionysus announces his revenge
upon the young king whom he has brought completely under his power. Why
Euripides introduces this sharp acknowledgment of Dionysus' polar qualities
at this moment of the play, and what does that timing indicate about his
depiction of the god? Dionysus remains potentially "most terrible"
in the broadest sense, as indeed he is in the "resistance myths"
of his arrival in places like Orchomenos (and, of course, the Bacchae's
Thebes). Like all Olympians in tragedy, he is "most terrible"
in his vengeance, but, as the early odes of the play make clear, also the
source of blessings of joy and happiness. S. may dislike polarity, but
I see no way to remove it from this passage.

Apropos of Ba. 319-21, on the god's need for honor
from the crowd, S. suggests that we imagine the god's "magnificent
festival of the democratic polis" and comments, "I have the disadvantage
that it is easier to reach for our copy of the Hippolytus."
But one can reach for almost any play of Euripides, and many of Sophocles,
to see that the gods' demand for honor is not quite so simple in tragedy,
or to use a word of mine that S. particularly dislikes, has a certain "complexity."

S. finds me "oddly" claiming that line 1295 means that "the
polis [is] rejecting Dionysus." My point here (DP
383) is not that the city rejects Dionysus but that 1295, along with 39-40
and 195-96, assigns some "responsibility" to the city for the
god's vengeance (to these passages may be added 50-52; and for the problems
raised by 1295 see below). S. develops a contrast between the polis and
the royal family for which there is little indication in the text, or little
that can bear the interpretative weight that he assigns to it. Lines 50-52,
in fact, imply a close identification between "the city of the Thebans"
and the king who threatens to lead the city in battle against the maenads
(cf. 780-85, especially epistrateuein, 784, and
stratêlatôn,
52). The Messenger's indignant, "Do you think Thebes so lacking manhood"
at 1036 implies an identification of Pentheus' death with the suffering
and humiliation of "Thebes," and the same is implied in the chorus'
reply, "Dionysus, not Thebes, holds power over me."

I would go even farther and suggest that the vagueness of the play's
references to the polis are part of a radical pattern of inversions, in
which the familiar city of male warriors -- the city so passionately
defended
by Pentheus, with his troops, walls, and towers -- is momentarily
glimpsed
as a kind of nightmarish city of maenads. Thus Dionysus' threat to wage
war "with arms" against the "polis of the Thebans"
as a general leading maenads in the prologue (50-52) turns out to be a
battle not with hopla but with thyrsuses, and not against
the organized militias of the city but against herdsmen and farmers (714ff.,
758ff.). It is the women who are "drawn up" with disciplined
eukosmia (693) like hoplites ( see DP
191ff.), and they who bear their anomalous hopla (733)
and swoop down like enemy troops (polemioi) to ravage
the fields around the city (752).

To return to 1295, therefore, when Cadmus explains to the now sane Agave,
"You were mad, and the whole polis was driven to
bacchic frenzy" (S.'s translation, slightly corrected), the polis
described by the city's founder seems to be identified with the raging
women. S. is momentarily troubled by the contradiction (see his 1996 Commentary
on 1295) but explains the problem away by a reference to his Introduction
(pp. 35-36). "The two old men," he notes, "are the only
male members of the polis to dance for Dionysus (195-96), even though Teiresias
insists that Dionysos demands honor from all men (206-9), and Kadmos eventually
states that the 'whole polis' was in a bacchic revel." Juxtaposing
this remark with the contexts noted above is revealing for S.'s approach.
By reading the play backward, as it were, from the future establishment
of Dionysus' cult at Thebes, he flattens out contradictions that, from
my perspective, are central to the play, i.e. the clash between male and
female power in the polis and the possibility that Dionysus' empowering
of women, if only temporarily and in an unstable way, calls into question
exactly what the polis is (think of the Thesmophoriazusae
and Ecclesiazusae).

A small point of language is instructive here. S. translates the aorist
passive exebakkheuthê in 1295 as "was in a state
of madness." Taken this way, the verb might be taken to prefigure
the unified city of the Dionysiac festivals. The aorist passive, however,
should mean "was driven into a state of bacchic madness, " and
so it refers to the specific events of the play, the painful process by
which Dionysus asserts his authority and establishes his cult in this polis.
The verb bakkheuein or ekbakkheuein
is regularly used as a transitive verb by Euripides (e.g., HF
966, Or. 411, Tro. 408; and the passive
also occurs in this sense (Or. 835). S.'s translation
would better correspond to a pluperfect passive (cf. Or.
835) rather than an aorist passive. Line 1295, moreover, must also be seen
in relation to the detailed account of that frenzy in 726-27, "The
whole mountain and the wild beasts were joining in the bacchic frenzy,"
where one should note the imperfect tense of sunebakkheue,
in contrast to the aorist of 1295.

For S. any reference to "polis" or "whole polis"
is to be seen retrospectively as a reflection of the eventual cultic triumph
of Dionysus as a god whose cult is intimately linked to the political unity
of Athens. I certainly do not deny the possible reference to external cultic
patterns (e.g., DP chap. 6), but one aim of DP
was to try to understand some of these ritual elements within their dramatic
contexts and in terms of patterns (in this case of the massive male/female
inversions) that the play develops around such central motifs as city,
arms, walls, towers, etc. The centrality of Dionysus to Thebes was a commonplace
of Athenian drama (S. Ant. 1122-25); and the play assumes
the establishment of Dionysus' cult at Thebes as a future event, like the
future cult of Hippolytus at Troezen. But what its action dramatizes is
not this future event but the painful process in the
present and the cost of human suffering that it brings.

S. has little or no interest in what he calls "the fashionable
abstract term 'metatheatricality.'" "Fashionable" is always
an easy put-down, and one that often says more about the user than the
subject-matter in question, but I would point out that neither the word
nor the thing was particularly fashionable when DP was
first published in 1982, and the idea is not especially abstract, perhaps
less abstract than S.'s "characteristic pattern of the mythical etiology
of ritual." Metatheatrical scenes call attention to the nature of
the performance qua performance and bracket this moment
as not just "theatrical," the enactment of fictional or mythical
events, like the rest of the play, but meta-theatrical. For S. scenes like
the transvestitism of Pentheus are "illuminated (non-obviously), in
general and in various details, by knowledge of the kind of (quasi-theatrical)
Dionysiac mystic ritual from which tragedy itself developed." I gratefully
receive such illumination, but to insist that this is the only or even
the primary meaning of such scenes is a reductive way to look at literature.

S. is perfectly justified in being as little interested in literary
self-reflexivity as I am said to be in the myths that etiologize ritual;
but for many readers and viewers, such play-within-a-play situations are
good to think with. Both ancient and modern audiences, like playwrights
and poets, like to think about how literature constructs its world of make-believe,
how it convinces us of the reality of that world, and what kind of "truth"
that represented world can have alongside the other, more "factual"
truths that guide our lives. As some indication of the implications of
this subject for the understanding of Greek drama, I may mention the recent
books of Bierl and Taplin or the other works cited in DP
370-75, or Dobrov's new collection The City as Comedy: Society
and Representation in Athenian Drama (Chapel Hill 1997).

The prism of S.'s interpretive optics creates some extraordinary distortions.
First, most of his review is directed at the three or four pages in which
I venture to disagree with his interpretation of the
Bacchae.2 Then, when I insist
repeatedly on the "balance" and "dialectic"
between order and disorder, he finds me engaged in a "privileging
of disorder," completely ignoring a main point of my book. He turns
my book into a straw man for an oversimplified order/disorder dichotomy.
Finally, I cannot pass over the following error. S. quotes from my new
Afterword (DP 357), where I view the tragic element
in the play as "bring[ing] together both order-creating and order-dissolving
forces of personal and social life in a balance that is always shifting
and unstable." S. then cites Oudemans and Lardinois' Tragic
Ambiguity (published in 1987) 216, who, he says, "anticipate,"
in a way "unknown to S[egal]" a "manoeuvre" of mine.
Had he bothered to read to the end of that 1987 "anticipation"
of my views, he would have seen that the authors are in fact citing me;
and the reference is not even in a footnote, but in the text, in parentheses,
"Segal, DP 286-87."3

S. and I are perhaps closest in his suggestion (remarked above) that
we might "view the end of Bacchae as the absorption
of the disorder represented by the drama into the order inherent in the
civic ritual henceforth to be celebrated in Thebes." This view approximates
that of the title chapter of DP (chapter 9, e.g., 340-41),
except that I regard that order as operative in the civic ritual of Athens,
and specifically in the Dionysiac ritual and its dramatic performances
for which the play was intended, rather than in the mythical Thebes of
the end of the play. S. has yet to convince me (or other interpreters,
like Friedrich, cited in n. 2) that the end of the Bacchae
shows this "order inherent in the civic ritual henceforth to be celebrated
in Thebes."

NOTES

1. See my review of his
Ritual and
Reciprocity
(BMCR 6 [1995] 651-657) and my "Chorus and Community
in Euripides' Bacchae," in Poet, Public,
and Performance in Ancient Greece, eds. Lowell Edmunds and Robert
W. Wallace (Baltimore 1997) 65-86, esp. 69-70; also DP
382-84.

2. For similar disagreements with S.'s
handling of Ba.
see, e.g., Rainer Friedrich, "Everything to Do with Dionysus?"
in Michael S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996) 274.

3. In a reply to R. Friedrich's criticisms of
some of his views in
Silk (preceding note) 290, S. refers to this same passage from Oudemans
and Lardinois. When he came to do the review of DP,
he seems to have forgotten that the scholars in question are citing me
(as they do on 32 other occasions, according to their index). In fact,
had S. bothered to look a few lines down on DP 357,
which he cites, he would have seen the citation "DP
330-47," part of the 1982 reprint, which I am recapitulating here
in the Afterword; and this "manoeuvre" is in fact a major theme
in the last chapter of DP (chap. 9).